Stanislaw’s shoulders weren’t twitching anymore. His fingers had relaxed too. None of the three, neither Proska nor Helmut nor the tall soldier, was sure that the wounded man was still alive. They were all suffering unspeakably from the muggy heat and the mosquito bites, and if it had been up to Poppek alone, he would simply have left Stani lying where he was and seen to it that he himself, Poppek, made it back to the Fortress. He dared to think that, but he feared to do it.
And so he only murmured impatiently, “Take hold of him, Thighbone, we have to hurry. But let me take his legs. You won’t mind getting Stani’s blood on your pants as much as I do. One, two, three!”
They lurched forward again, staggering over the yielding terrain, with Helmut in front, the tall soldier in the middle, and Proska last, trying hard to keep a close watch on the treetops, but only seldom able to tear his eyes away from Stani.
As they were wading across a ditch, the wounded man groaned.
“He alive!” Zwiczosbirski shouted joyously. “He not dead!”
“Yell like that again and you’ll be gargling mud,” Helmut said.
“Let them shoot,” the tall soldier said, gnashing his teeth. “I show them my magic rifle.”
“Shut up,” said Helmut, “or I’ll toss your Stani into the water.”
They stopped talking. The back of one of Proska’s hands swelled up and turned red. The insect bites burned horribly. He drew his hand through the water, barely soothing the pain.
Their sweat liners were stuck to their necks. The men were finding it hard to breathe.
After they were out of the ditch, Proska asked, “So where is your Fortress?”
“Soon,” said the tall soldier. “We must make small detour.”
They panted up a slope, pulling and dragging Stani with them. The sky grew cloudy overhead.
Helmut groaned, “Put him down, I can’t go anymore.”
They stood up and straightened their spines, which made them feel like kings. When a man thrusts his head out from between shoulders crushed under the heel of destiny, he becomes as God originally conceived him: upright, fearless, and good, a tree in his stride and pure water in his thought.
Rat-tat-tat, a sudden hammering. The men flung themselves on the ground, locked and loaded their weapons. Rat-tat-tat, the shots rang out again and then again, and the men heard the rounds sizzling away above them, and sometimes, when a bullet struck the ground ahead, they could also see the earth ripped up and sprayed about.
The tall soldier rolled on his side, pulled his helmet down on his forehead, and raised his head. His gaze fell on three alders, and he immediately suspected they were where the shots were coming from. The trees’ foliage was too thick for him to tell whether the shooter was sitting on a branch. But Thighbone was a patient man, and he waited for the next burst of fire—which was obviously meant for him—and aimed his weapon.
“Watch this,” he said in a strangled voice.
Proska and Poppek stared at the group of trees.
Zwiczosbirski fired, and in the same moment, all three of them saw a man come crashing down from the tree in the middle.
“Little bird up in tree make such pretty sound, now no singing up in tree, little bird on ground,” sang the tall soldier, and then he got to his feet.
When the other two saw that no more shots were being fired, they too stood up.
“Now bear goes wild. Why they make him mad? Angry animal bite faster than contented one. We can go on.”
“There’s no point,” said Helmut.
“What?” asked Proska in consternation.
“I think Stani’s dead.”
“But he groaned,” cried the tall soldier, horrified. “What you want?”
“It’s best for us to leave him here.”
Proska said, “I think you’re crazy. We can’t just leave a man lying here like this.”
Poppek spat to one side. He said, “And if all three of us croak on account of him? No thanks, I’d rather not.” He raised his right foot and kicked Stani’s hand with the toe of his boot. “Look, he doesn’t even move. He’s better off than we are in this goddamned wilderness. We can put him in a coffin later.”
Without a word, Proska slung his rifle around his neck, elbowed Poppek out of the way, and said to the tall soldier, “Take his legs. You and I will carry Stani back.”
They tramped farther, lugging the wounded man between them: first Zwiczos, hanging his head, and behind him Proska, open-mouthed. Helmut followed, covering them. All of a sudden, Proska felt an insect on his tongue, a raft spider, a fly, maybe a beetle. He himself had no idea what kind of little beast it was. He tried to spit it out, aiming over and across the man they were carrying, but he didn’t succeed right away. Before he knew it, the thing was between his teeth, and he instinctively bit down. When he realized what he’d bitten, a heavy wave of nausea surged up in him; he could taste the stomach acid slowly flooding his mouth. But Proska got a mighty grip on himself, suppressed his urge to vomit, and so avoided the necessity of putting Stani down again. Had they laid the man with the shattered face on the marshy ground, on the ground that now smelled like a morgue attendant’s moldy clothing, then all three of them would have seen that Stani was dead. But they needed their eyes for the task of finding the best way through the tonguelike creepers hanging down from the spidery, bony trees. The trees oddly resembled old men with beards that reached the ground, and when the wind blew through their hair, they seemed to shiver. The wilderness, innocent and sensuous, gazed at the men, whom—had you observed them from a decent distance—you wouldn’t have described as wheezing, groaning, all but desperate creatures, because seen from afar, they looked like the figures in certain old copper engravings one sometimes finds, engravings that depict people moving about market squares merrily, aimlessly, randomly, free of all gravity.
• FOUR •
They called the Fortress Waldesruh, “Forest Peace,” the name given it by a certain Hoffmann, a soldier who had disappeared without trace more than six months previously. Hoffmann had carried around with him (God knows where he got it) a piece of chalk, a dry, four-sided piece of teacher’s chalk, and when the so-called Fortress—a house constructed of thick planks, against whose walls so many big clumps of turf had been piled that a hand grenade exploding outside would not have particularly endangered the skat players within—when, that is, the people building the Fortress had finished their work, Gottlieb Hoffmann, a bookbinder from Leipzig, had taken a piece of chalk from his pocket, stood on the long-limbed Zwiczosbirski’s shoulders, and written over the entrance, in exaggeratedly ornate capital letters, WALDESRUH. One day, Goofy Gottlieb, as his fellows called him, had failed to return from a patrol, and nobody could say whether he’d been shot, met with an accident, or simply—out of the blue—skedaddled. The men hardly spoke of him anymore, but when they looked up before entering the Fortress, they could still see the remains of Gottlieb’s baptism. Rain and time had of course had their way with his chalk, and it wasn’t very easy anymore to make out the name. Even initiates could hardly read more than ESRUH. But at least they knew that once upon a time, the word WALDESRUH had stood there.
The tree trunks the walls had been made from were impervious to any infantry fire. On the day when the sweating men stood before the finished structure, the corporal had taken the matter of the security assessment into his own hands by bracing a submachine gun against his hip and firing an entire magazine at the wooden structure. Next, the others were ordered to determine how deeply the bullets had penetrated into the wood. Then the corporal, a hoarse, boozy fellow with a dried-up face, called his unit together and bellowed that the construction of the Fortress had taken them four hours more than he had reckoned, and that they could be grateful to him for relieving them of the most important duty of all, namely the security assessment. This noncommissioned officer was called Willi Stehauf. He had the responsibil
ity for his people, distributed the mail, which turned up about once every three weeks, gave out as many cigarettes and as much schnapps and RIF soap, and no more, as could be reconciled with his conscience, and also determined who would go on railroad patrol and where, so it was no wonder that Willi Stehauf deemed himself the busiest and most harassed of men, and his facial features reflected so much sullenness that everyone—maybe with the exception of Thighbone and Stani, because they could lighten their hearts in Willi’s presence by cursing him in Polish—preferred to be outdoors in the marshy landscape rather than enveloped in the miasma of sweat and schnapps that emanated from their corporal.
The Fortress stood on a little height, from which you had a view, on the left, of a less overgrown but also unwalkable marshy meadow; behind the blockhouse, two birch trees, slender, white, innocent; on the right side, a luxuriant, mixed-growth forest that could comfortably be reached in ten bounds. A few steps from the entrance, a ditch two meters wide held putrescent water. This ditch connected the pond to the big river. A resilient alder trunk that a painter and varnisher from Kappeln an der Schlei named Paul Zacharias had laid across the ditch served as a bridge.
In addition to Thighbone, Poppek, Stani, Willi, and Zacharias, two other men—one and a half, in the corporal’s estimation—had been assigned to this outpost. One was Ferdinand Ellerbrok, a slovenly former circus artist with a Levantine face, and the other was Wolfgang Kürschner. Ellerbrok had glued to his bunk an old, well-worn visiting card on which was written, in discreet lettering, FERN ELLO, ARTISTE, and on the next line, slightly smaller, PRESIDENT OF THE GERMAN FIRE-EATERS’ ASSOCIATION. When his comrades saw the card for the first time, they bombarded him with requests to eat flames before their eyes. And Stani had even been prepared to sacrifice his cigarette lighter fluid for the proposed special performance. But “Melon”—as the artiste, on account of his large head, was called, first by Willi and then also by the others—explained repeatedly that in order to “lay the fire” properly, he had to have a bottle of schnapps. And since with the exception of Wolfgang Kürschner none of the others could declare themselves prepared to contribute their schnapps ration to him, Melon shrugged his shoulders regretfully and waddled outside to his hen, Alma. He’d known her since she was a chick, as he was wont to say, and now he wanted to tame her.
Wolfgang Kürschner was the so-called Half-Portion, the Milk Roll, a young, long-haired, dreamy-eyed soldier who suffered from a weak stomach. He sent and received the most mail. His father, a regimental commander, had fallen in battle at Warsaw; to his mother, who worried about her only son in Podejuch, a suburb of Stettin, he wrote long letters in which he earnestly and ponderously meditated on consolation and death.
Tall Zwiczos was very fond of him, and the Upper Silesian had once come very close to punching out the corporal, who found Wolfgang even more unbearable than all the others. Willi hated the frail kid and made sure the young man could feel his antipathy.
When they reached the alder trunk bridge, Thighbone stopped and said, panting, “Put Stani down. On ground. We arrive now.”
They set down their burden; Proska used his handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his neck and forehead and looked over to the Fortress. The wooden building had the air of a workplace after closing time. Two soldiers were sitting on a bench. One of them was whittling a branch; the other, a chubby little man with a fat head, was balancing a chicken on one hand and trying to train the fowl to jump first onto his right shoulder, then onto his head, then back down to his left shoulder, and finally to his left hand.
“Hey!” Thighbone called over to the two men. “Come here! Come fast! Something terrible happen Stani!”
Both soldiers looked up. The shouting scared the hen, which fluttered to the ground.
“But we can carry Stani over the bridge ourselves,” Proska said.
“You right,” the tall soldier said. “Lift up!”
Cautiously, they carried the wounded man over the ditch and brought him up to the building. Taking great care, they laid him on the bench. The fat little man forgot his chicken and stared at Stani, who wasn’t moving, with frightened eyes.
“But he’s dead,” said the fat-headed soldier.
“Not dead,” Thighbone retorted decisively. “He make groan, and if can groan, cannot be dead, no? Have I right, Walter?”
Proska nodded, although he knew no trace of life remained in Stani. He pulled out his no longer clean handkerchief, unfolded it, or actually tugged it apart, and covered the shredded face with it.
Suddenly, the corporal appeared in the Fortress entrance, sullenness and infinite self-assurance in the desert of his face. His first look fell on Walter Proska, and he bawled at him in a hoarse, drunken voice: “What does that guy want? Where did you scare him up? He won’t present himself? What kind of swamp scum is he?”
The assistant went up to him, saluted, and said, “Private First Class Proska, Ninety-sixth Grenadier Regiment, Sixth Battalion, First Company.”
“And what are you doing here?” the corporal yelled.
Tall Zwiczos chimed in, saying, “Train fly in air with him inside. I pick him up. We must make phone call.”
“We don’t get any supplies here, including cigarettes and schnapps,” Willi said to Proska. “We have to procure everything we need ourselves. You got that?”
“Yes, Corporal.”
“Good. In that case, you can march back to the railroad and wait for the next train.”
Thighbone said, “They bust up Stani’s face. But he not dead. He make groan, word of honor. When we pull him through the water.”
“Have you brought him back with you?” asked the corporal.
“Yes. Walter give help.”
“Who’s Walter?”
“This one here,” said Zwiczos, laying his arm on Proska’s shoulder.
“Where’s Stani?”
“Here on bench, Corporal. He alive, he make groan, word of honor.”
The corporal stepped close to Stani, snatched the now blood-soaked handkerchief from his face, bent down, and performed an attentive examination, so that all those watching him thought he looked like a meat inspector. Then he clenched his teeth and said laconically to the fat artiste and Zacharias, “You two haven’t done anything yet. Go dig a grave. Stani’s dead. Take his pay book, his dog tags, his wallet, and his rings. If you plant them with him, you’re in big trouble!” Then he said to Thighbone, who was standing there as though turned to stone, “You’re just as stupid as you are tall. Dragging around a useless piece of dead flesh, what a guy. You ought to be punished for being so dumb. Just be glad I’m good-natured. Suppose they had caught you out there! Before you had time to lay that”—he jerked his head in Stani’s direction—“on the grass, none of you would have been good for anything but coffee strainers. Am I right?”
The tall soldier stood there like an old, solitary pine tree, making a desperate effort to draw up nourishment out of the stingy ground. He looked as though he might topple over any second, and his frightened eyes, which were darting around in all directions, appeared to bring him only the melancholy certainty that it basically made no difference which way he fell, for now that Stani was dead, there was no one standing close enough to break his fall, no one to support his continued existence, however askew it might be. Thighbone’s arms dangled at his sides like branches someone had tried to break off but then abandoned, because the bark was too unyielding. His gaze seemed to come to rest on the place over the entrance where the remains of Goofy Gottlieb’s chalk letters could still be seen.
Everyone, including the corporal, looked up at him, and no one dared to say a word.
Then, unexpectedly, he turned round in a circle once, and just when the men were thinking he would fall headlong to the ground, he got hold of himself, walked slowly and perpendicularly down the slope, crossed over the ditch like a sleepwalker, and then turned to the right.
<
br /> After Zwiczosbirski had disappeared into the woods, the corporal said, “It’s going to take our tall friend some more time to get over this. His thoughts have a longer way to go.” He—and nobody else—grinned at his remark.
“Melon and Zacharias, I’ve already told you what you’re supposed to do. And you, come see me. But first I have to telephone. What’s your name again?”
“Proska, Walter.”
“Good. Wait here. Or—just come on inside now.”
They entered the Fortress. Along one wall stood three double-decker bunks, in front of them a small, dusty potbelly stove. A crude table board fashioned by the men themselves lay atop the stove, and around it were six stools, arranged in a semicircle. In one corner there was a single, more comfortable bed, and in front of it, on a box that had once contained canned goods, a field telephone.
Willi lifted the receiver and quickly started turning the little crank. He said, half turned toward Proska, “I hope they haven’t cut our line…Hello! Tomashgrod! Please respond…Post twenty-five here…Tomashgrod, yes, sir, Corpo—…Please? Ah. Yes, sir, Sergea—…Corporal Stehauf of Post twenty-five speaking…Yessir…That’s the reason for my call…The train attack took place in our sector…Survivors? Yes, one, as far as I know…Of course I do, his name is Proska…I didn’t understand…Private First Class Proska…His unit will be notified…And another thing…I didn’t understand…Yessir…To report the loss of one man…The fellow’s name was Paputka…Stanislaw…Yessir…a half-Polack…Yessir…As you say, Sergea—…I agree completely…his place…I believe so…Sauerkraut…Many thanks…Over and out.”
The corporal hung up the receiver, turned around, and said, “You’re going to remain here, understand?”
“But I have to—”
“Shut your trap or you’ll catch a cold in the guts. You’ll remain here; your unit will be notified. Don’t give it any thought; I do the thinking here, for you and everyone else. Understand?”
The Turncoat Page 5
